


Seven Days in the Wilderness

by seventhe



Category: Final Fantasy IX
Genre: Gen, genfic, precocious six-year-olds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-16
Updated: 2010-05-16
Packaged: 2017-10-09 12:19:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhe/pseuds/seventhe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eiko tries to find herself in Lindblum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Days in the Wilderness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissMaggie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissMaggie/gifts).



Seven Days in the Wilderness

\- - -

_Eiko. Adjusting to life in Lindblum. 'Everyone felt sorry for Dagger for losing her true love, but what about me? I lost two of my best friends, and I get to stick out like a sore thumb in a strange new city.' Something Eiko-centric. What's it like to go from orphan to princess? Does she feel badly for breaking her promise and leaving the village behind?_

\- - -

Her first day in Lindblum is really a night and a day: an evening arrival after a long airship ride leading to a late bedtime and a sleepless night. Eiko eyes the guest-room with excited trepidation and puts on the simple sleeping robe they leave her and climbs into the guest bed with its clean sheets and pillows (multiple pillows! more than one! she is amazed) and -- lies there, staring at the ceiling. Lindblum is noisy, even at night, the constant sounds of the air-traffic and the whirring of machinery deep beneath the city like a thrumming heartbeat. It's nothing like the bone-deep silence of Madain Sari, although after their travels Eiko's used to sleeping through everything: wind, rain, the howling of dragons, Amarant's snoring. The hum of the city reminds her that she's safe; it envelops her like a blanket. Eiko tosses and turns in nervous contemplation.

_Hush_, say her eidolons, and there's a brush against her horn like a comforting palm. _Hush_.

Eiko smiles, and still does not sleep. Once an hour she gets up out of the spacious bed and pads to the window, to look out: Lindblum does not seem to sleep, its lights and sounds carrying on through the night; Eiko feels it, is enthralled by it, and decides not to sleep either. She is in Lindblum, now, and she wants to be a part of it more than anything.

So she spends the night in-between her wide-open window and the luxurious comfort of the guest bed, and does not sleep.

The morning after she is greeted by Queen Hilda - _Mother_, immediately, and the word spills from her mouth three or four times before Eiko notices her highness' delicate flush and wonders whether she should be pleased or embarrassed. There's a bath involved (a bath! the size of her bed! Eiko marvels) and a breakfast, a proper one; Eiko laughs aloud at the many sizes of her forks, and Queen Hilda laughs with her while pointing out their uses.

The Grand Castle is amazing. The Queen shows her around the Middle Floor, mostly for guests, and Eiko marvels at it: the easy transportation into the districts, access to the great airships, the guest lounge which will always have a sandwich for her no matter what time it is.

"If you wish to stay," says Queen Hilda, and her voice is so gentle and warm and loving that Eiko wants nothing more than that, _immediately, yesterday_; "we will make you chambers on the Top Floor with Cid and I, and we will fill them with every single wonderful thing you might want. But don't feel like you have to stay, Eiko dear," and her voice turns a little bit sad, or maybe just wistful. "We hope that you love it here, but we don't want to make you feel like you must. We know this isn't your home."

"But it can be," Eiko insists, and she wants it so badly she can't help but think of Madain Sari and the ruins in her heart; it tugs at her eidolons as she says, "I want it to be."

The Queen smiles at her, and says, "We will see, Eiko dear," and it sounds like a promise.

She tries so hard that day to be good that she falls asleep during the private dinner Cid and Hilda - _Mother_ and _Father_ \- have arranged for her, and she only wakes up a little when their private serving-girl sets her back into the guest bed.

She struggles a little against the inevitability, but her eidolons say, _Hush, Eiko_, and she sleeps.

\- - -

"Only your second day," says Queen Hilda, with an imperious wave at the serving girl; her name is Celeste, and she has been boggling at Eiko's horn all morning. "But it doesn't look like you have anything else to wear, do you? Of course not," she answers herself, "where would you find it? Lindblum will take care of you."

Eiko has never seen such things: silks, beads, lace, ruffles. Queen Hilda has thrown open a cupboard, and it is full of colors, a veritable symphony of the rainbow; it reminds Eiko of the fields of flowers she used to hide in, and she finds herself drawn to bright coral and sun-yellow, even as the Queen tries to suggest pale greens and soft blues.

"I realize this is overwhelming," the Queen says, and Eiko stops, her hands buried deep in a sea-green something she doesn't even recognize. Hilda's voice is a little sad. "But I thought perhaps it might make you feel more like a princess, Eiko dear."

Celeste is stalking about the room, dutifully picking up the dresses Hilda and Eiko discard, and staring at Eiko's horn when she thinks no one is noticing. She doesn't realize Eiko always notices; the sensation of eyes on her horn is something Eiko is used to: it feels like a light breeze, somehow, the brush of awareness against her sensitive magical core.

"A princess," Eiko says, her hands buried in something pink and bright. "I don't even know what a princess wears." She thinks of Garnet - of Dagger, wearing battle garb, orange and white, looking lovely and graceful and more beautiful than summoning, but not necessarily _royal_ at all. She hasn't seen Garnet in a long time, she thinks, and the thought makes her suddenly sad; Garnet would know how to pick a dress. She'd help Eiko out, and then they'd go have tea with Hilda, and talk about -- things princesses and queens talk about. Garnet could help her, because Eiko doesn't know how to be a princess yet.

These are the things Eiko doesn't know. She knows a lot about dirt, and moogles, and washing her clothes in the stream and stealing food from dwarves. She doesn't know anything about silverware and pillows and ceremony, and she knows less than nothing about being royal.

"What about this?" Hilda - Mother asks, and Eiko shakes her eidolons out of her head and looks.

Queen Hilda delicately plucks something from the cupboard. It's a compromise, Eiko thinks: a sunny peach, but simple, the kind of dress a princess could royally run and play in. She loves it immediately; Hilda's face lights up as she grabs at it and smiles.

_I can do this,_ Eiko tells her eidolons, a mix of excited and determined.

\- - -

"Come, little one." Cid's dressed up and beaming, and Eiko is so honored to be holding his hand as the gate swings open slowly. She's looked down upon Lindblum for two days, and now they're in the heart of it: it steams, teeming with life, and she squeezes Cid's hand in her eagerness, trying not to fidget with her new dress.

"This is my city," Cid says, and his voice is both price and joy. They step out into it, and are almost immediately caught up in an odd kind of bustle. Eiko watches the crowd, as it flows past them, parting weirdly and almost surprisedly about Cid, bows and smiles and apologies on every face.

The eyes turn to her, after they have taken in their Regent; Eiko feels the looks, the stares at her horn and her hair, at her Madain face. Her eidolons murmur in her head, and Eiko strains to look into the faces of those who stare, trying to read what they think of her. Will this city have her?

Cid leads her down a main street whose name she couldn't have remembered if it were a summon, because there are eyes on her: so many eyes. Eiko isn't used to people. Yes, she and Zidane and Garnet and all the others roamed the world and talked to crowds and saved tons of people and did everything, but underneath all of it she's still a wild spirit who talked only to moogles and herself for more months than she'd really like to think about.

They stare. They stare, and Lindblum stares behind them. At first Eiko tries to stare back: it's a challenge, and she has always liked games. But Lindblum is too big, too rough, and it continues to churn, slowly, gears turning and minds thinking at her and eyes looking at her. Cid is talking, proudly weaving the history of his city from her cobblestones, and all Eiko can hear is the rush of the eyes upon her horn.

She stumbles. Cid catches her up, automatically sweeping her into his arms, and Eiko hears the murmurs in the echoes of what her eidolons sense: who is this child, the eyes ask? This stranger, with her summoner's marks, coming into our city and living in our royal palace?

She wraps her arms around Cid's neck and breathes. He smells like engine oil and dust, but it's surprisingly human. It smells kind of like Madain Sari would, after a rain, when the air was full of things organic. Cid and Hilda don't stare at her horn; they laugh, and argue, and talk to her like she's a human child.

Lindblum is full of mechanical eyes.

"You must be tired," Cid says, and his voice is kind and rough and honest; "well, it's been a long day, and you're probably still recovering from the shock, poor girl." He bounces her, a little. "Come on, then; let's go see whether we can find some ice cream."

Eiko lets Cid carry her back to the palace. He hums as they walk, some happy tune she doesn't recognize. It rumbles against her ear, and Eiko breathes it in, wanting to understand.

\- - -

By the fourth day there is something stirring in her blood. Lindblum is a city of metal and grit and electricity and air: there is no space here, no wide-open earth-under-sky; everything is bound up by circuits and thermodynamics and gravity, and her skin's teeming with the need for space. Eiko feels trapped, kept, bound, closed in by the always-humming walls of her palace, surrounded by machinery without a tree in sight.

The Regent and the Queen are both bound up in their duties today; Eiko, restless, finds it easier than Cure to slip away from Celeste; no Lindblum maid will ever be a match for a Madain Sari wild-child raised on moogles and empty air, no matter how much training she has had, and Eiko darts out of her grasp and skips like sun-shadow through the Grand Palace until she comes to the Dragon's Gate. The faint sun outside is calling her and she feels her eidolons under her skin like her heartbeat, and she slips out the Gate and kicks off her shoes and runs.

She doesn't go far. She can't; Eiko is well aware of the dangers outside Lindblum, even with the Mist fading away, and even hyped up with freedom-screaming eidolons and white magic she's still well aware of her own limitations. She stops sooner than she wants and falls down into the grass, reveling at the sight of the sky above her. Lindblum is a shadow behind her, at the edge of her vision, and Eiko knows that's permanent, it's for real, so she turns her back on it for these few minutes.

She isn't used to walls. Madain Sari barely had houses, let alone palaces, let alone Grand Palaces with Floors and Maids and Capital Letters, and the past few days have been so full of - of layers. Eiko wants to -- to strip off her tailored trousers and run naked through the grass with moogles, even if she knows it's childish and ridiculous, and some strange part of her thinks, it is only since Lindblum and the Grand Palace that she's been separating childish from Eikoish anyway.

It smells like grass, and dirt, and something's crawling on her arm. The sun is baking her skin and her horn tingles faintly with warmth. She's going to be filthy.

Maybe Lindblum isn't going to be enough. Eiko misses Madain Sari, and her dirty, gritty world of moogles and stolen bread and no one telling her to go to bed. She misses the stars above her at night and the grass in her hair and the quiet breathing of Mog; although Madeen whisper-breathes in her heart and her horn, always, it isn't the same when there's a smile-faced stranger tucking you into clean sheets in the guest room. She's wild; there's a part of her that's her own mother and father and grandfather and eidolon, and it thunders in her against the crisply-regulated electricity Lindblum is rooted in.

Eiko's starting to understand why Queen Hilda keeps _asking_.

\- - -

This day is different; it's a procession, almost. Queen Hilda walks daintily between shops, her face regal and some combination of lovely-friendly-stern Eiko recognizes from Dagger's expressions as some kind of queenly thing she can only hope to ever partially emulate. Cid follows behind, pleased and nervous, hopping between Hilda and herself as if there's still oglop in his system.

But this time, it's a little bit different. The people still stare, but they're not hostile; Hilda's presence soothes them, and Eiko's horn is the same as it was last time they looked, and the gazes feel more like curious rain-winds than angry storm-winds like last time. Her eidolons murmur and preen. Eiko walks with her head up and her bright yellow dress whirling about her ankles.

She buys ice cream from a vendor -- she does, herself, with a coin Cid gives her, and as she takes it in her hand she dips a little, something between a bow and a curtsey (because she can't do either properly with an ice cream cone) and says gravely, "Thank you." The vendor smiles at her, and the people murmur.

It turns approving when she turns around and eagerly stuffs half the ice cream in her mouth; it surprises her, and she ends up with ice cream on her nose. Hilda's laughing, a light giggle behind delicate fingers, and Cid rushes to the vendor to hastily borrow a kerchief to clean Eiko off. Her horn tingles, a little.

They walk, and Eiko pays more attention this time (around the deliciousness of the ice cream, which is quickly gone). Lindblum murmurs under her feet. She listens with her ears and her horn and her eidolons, and the murmurs of the crowd, the wind-flicks of their gazes on her horn: it all blends into something long and slow and smooth. The song of Lindblum's circuits, gears turning under her feet, dependable and mechanical and rooted in the earth in a way she hears, now.

Eiko still feels like a bit that doesn't fit, a gear that just isn't turning right. But Queen Hilda - her Mother - takes her hand and smiles at her, and it's a little bit of grace beaming like sunshine through the clouds in Madain Sari. She is not yet a princess, not yet really their daughter, but -- she is trying, and the city judges her well, this time. She smiles up at Mother, and walks with her head up.

That night, Eiko sits at her window and watches the city. She opens her heart, a little, not to summon but just to let her eidolons out a bit. They bask in the city's gaze, listening to its rhythm, and she wishes her mother were still around to tell her what they're saying. Madeen is the clearest, but they aren't even words, just flickering colors of thought and emotion across Eiko's heart like an invisible spectrum.

_Can we live here?_ she asks, and it hurts, because she's serious; she wants to know whether they'll make it in a city of grit and gear and a palace of order and ceremony.

She thought it would be easy, this; she had jumped at the chance, jumped and clutched at Mother and Father as if sheer determination would be enough, because it had been every time before: Eiko Carol's determination, a thing feared by Moogles and monsters and dwarves with stocked larders.

\- - -

Eiko wanders the Palace, slowly, as the storm lashes the windows and rumbles under her feet. They had planned to walk the city, but the weather has interfered. It is her sixth day in Lindblum.

She's lonely. It takes her a while to realize it, because it's hard to be lonely with the whisper-murmur of eidolons in your heart; and it takes her a little while longer to admit it, but she finds herself suddenly stamping her feet as her heart twists with a selfish flare of pain.

It isn't _fair._ She's here in Lindblum by herself, and Hilda and Cid - Mother and Father - they are kind and loving and funny and it isn't _enough._ Eiko wants Vivi, her friend-brother, magic-caster, someone to giggle with at night. She wants Dagger: her summoning-sister, even as Eiko played at rivalry between them like a silly bedtime story. She wants Zidane, pseudo-boyfriend, protector and brother tied up in a charming thief she'd had a crush on before he opened his mouth. Eiko misses it, the way they all slept back-to-back, even Freya (who rarely slept) and Amarant (who snored).

The night before she'd tried to arrange her pillows in a party-pile, pretending her head was on Zidane's stomach and her arms around Vivi, with Steiner at her back. It hadn't worked.

Eiko smooths her skirts and thinks of Princess Garnet. Queen Garnet, now; Eiko pictures her in a white dress, with flowers in her hair or on her skirts, decked out like royalty. She wonders whether Garnet is lonely. She wonders whether Garnet misses Dagger, or the warm pile of bodies they used to sleep in.

But even Garnet got to go back home: back to Alexandria, back to a land which hails her as its own; back to Steiner and Beatrix, back to her court. Garnet has a home, and a place, and a position. Garnet lost Zidane, but... they all lost Zidane.

Eiko thought she knew things about being a princess, from bedtime stories and fairy-tales and one especially naughty storybook she'd pilfered from Conde Petie; she thought she knew them, until she met Dagger, and saw Garnet within Dagger: a princess, beautiful and lovely and fragile like all of the stories, but wielding a knife and kidnapping _herself_ and waging war with summons at her dainty fingertips. Garnet marched into battle; Garnet didn't take no for an answer; Garnet was sweet _and_ brave. And Eiko thought, maybe that's what Princesses do.

She'd been jealous of Garnet because she wanted to _be_ Garnet. And now Eiko is alone in a Palace and finding that being a Princess isn't anything like a storybook, and it isn't anything like watching Dagger in battle. Or maybe it's that every Princess has a different story, and hers is just as clumsy-bright and dirty and lonely as she is.

She misses Garnet. Garnet always knew what to say, and she'd have some kind of heartfelt way to express the things clutching at Eiko's heart right now.

\- - -

On the morning of her seventh day in Lindblum, Eiko awakens in the large bed with its numerous pillows and feels different.

She breathes. The air tastes normal.

She sits up. Her eidolons are sleeping, silent; quieter than they've been in days. It's a peaceful feeling, them all wrapped up around her heart like a muddle of warm soft blankets, teeming with gentle energy.

She gets out of bed, and her feet take her to the closet. She takes the blue skirt, the one bright enough for her liking but tame enough to please Queen Hilda; as she dresses, she thinks about the day, and whether they'll go out into the city again.

Her walk down the hall is absent-minded, her eyes on the gilded picture-frames and the quaint landscapes (Cid claims a grandmother who likes to paint) and her mind out in Lindblum's whirring circuitry. It isn't until the door to the suite where she and Mother have breakfast appears before her that Eiko stops, and realizes that she has done this all by instinct, like it's normal, as if she's just living another day in Lindblum's Palace.

Eiko smiles, a real broad grin at herself, and opens the door.

That day Queen Hilda speaks to her about a tutor, and Eiko is asked to read some storybooks; her reading skills impress the young man assigned to her, although her lack of concentration does not. They then ask her to solve some puzzles, and Cid comes in at the end and declares her a genius and presents her with a tiny toolbox he says she'll need if she's going to help him build airships when she grows up. The little toolbox has a small wrench and a hammer and a temperature gauge, and Eiko looks at it with the same wonder she felt when Hilda presented her with a small but notable pile of jewels she said were suitable for a young child.

Her heart swells, and she's hugging them, Mother and Father both, running in-between them like an overly-excited moogle herself until they come together in the room, both embracing her just like she wants. Eiko fits her head in somewhere on Hilda's shoulder and her self somewhere on Cid's lap and she _doesn't care_ as she sits and giggles like it's the only thing she knows how to do.

\- - -

The morning dawns. Eiko lifts her head off of the pillow of her window-seat, where she fell asleep watching the flashing circuits in Lindblum.

Mother is crouched beside her, one hand in Eiko's hair, stroking gently. "Good morning, Eiko dear." Her voice is soft and warm. "Did you fall asleep watching the skycars?"

Eiko smiles, and stretches, and nods. Below her window, Lindblum murmur-roars at her, and her eidolons swell about her heart in response. Lindblum's awareness brushes against her horn; the awareness of an entire city, for one moment, recognizing its newest and most out-of-place princess for her efforts more than anything else.

"You can't do this every night," Hilda chides, her voice amused and playful. "You'll start classes soon, and you're going to need your sleep to get through them. Come, now, let's get you into the bath."

Eiko takes her Mother's hand. It is her eighth day in Lindblum; she has wandered this wild place for seven days, but now she's ready to call it home.

**Author's Note:**

> &lt;3 I hope this fits the bill. I'm fascinated by Eiko, and writing her as a child was a welcome challenge - she's so precocious it's sometimes hard to remember that she's so young - and I loved the excuse to meta about her powers some, as well. Thank you for such an awesome prompt!


End file.
